MUG will join GRAM (Georgia Regional Astronomical Meeting) on October 24th and 25th and continue on October 26th and 27th. This will be a “traveling” conference featuring three planetarium resources in the Atlanta area. It will start at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, GA (40′ dome), move on to the engineering and test dome facility at MTE in Atlanta (20′ dome) and end at the Museum of Arts & Sciences Museum in Macon (44′ dome).

This year, one of the MUG highlights will be a day-long workshop at MTE-Atlanta on using World-Wide Telescope (WWT) as a production tool for planetariums.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics WWT Ambassador Mary Becker will facilitate this all-day workshop. We will learn how to access to WWT’s extensive databases for geology, weather, exoplanets and cosmology and how to create lessons/movies at any resolution that will play on Mediaglobes and any other fulldome digital planetarium systems.There is no registration fee and lunch for each day is sponsored by MTE and KMP. However, you must register for MUG and for GRAM by October 1st to reserve your place for these events.

Another highlight will be the opportunity for MUG delegates to join GRAM and more than 75 amateur and professional astronomers and astrophysicists from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama.

MUG will be able to participate in GRAM with no additional registration fees and attend the Key Note Speaker & Public Lecture on Friday Evening October 24th sponsored by KMP and MTE. Dr. Rosaly Lopes, will be speaking about Cassini Mission to Saturn & Moons. Dr. Lopes, a volcanologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is on the science team for one of the Galileo instruments that has returned information about active volcanoes, the near-infrared mapping spectrometer, or NIMS. She is a native of Brazil who earned her doctorate from the University of London. In September 1979, she was doing field research at Mt. Etna, on the Italian island of Sicily, when a crater only about a mile away from her exploded and killed several people. “I really learned to respect volcanoes,” Lopes said.